So far this fiscal year, the National Institutes of Health's grants to universities are down by more than ninety per cent.
For Johns Hopkins, the first shot from the Trump Administration came on February 28, 2025. That day, a press release from the Department of Justice arrived, saying that the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism would be visiting ten campuses, including Hopkins, to investigate potential violations of federal law. Nobody ever visited the university, but subsequent shots had far more severe consequences. The federal government terminated eight hundred million dollars in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Hopkins had been administering; this led the university to lay off more than two thousand employees. The slowdown and termination of scientific-research grants at Hopkins resulted in an additional financial hit of five hundred million dollars last year.
At Brown, administrators learned that their grant funding was ending from an April 3rd article in the Daily Caller, the conservative paper co-founded by Tucker Carlson. "EXCLUSIVE," the headline read. "Trump Admin Freezes Hundreds of Millions of Dollars to Another Ivy League School." Later that day, the government stopped payment on all of its research grants to Brown, amounting to five hundred and ten million dollars. Princeton got its notification on March 31st: more than two hundred million dollars in research grants had been suspended. The Trump Administration was simultaneously sending a series of letters to almost every college and university in the country, beginning on February 14th. The first one ordered all schools to end their D.E.I. programs.
It's impossible to exaggerate the degree of shock moves like these caused in American Ă©lite higher education. One could ask: How did universities not see the assault coming? In the early weeks of 2025, it had been little more than a year since the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned, after facing harsh questioning by members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about antisemitism on campus. Beginning in the first week of his second term, Donald Trump signed a raft of executive orders targeting higher education, by, among other things, ordering investigations into D.E.I. programs and antisemitism on college campuses. And hadn't the new Vice-President, J. D. Vance, given a widely noticed address at a conservative convention in 2021 which he titled "Universities Are the Enemy"?
Now the compact between the universities and the federal government has been broken, and maybe not just temporarily. The Trump Administration has deployed a brutally effective, previously unused technique for getting these institutions' full attention: suspending their funds, even those appropriated by Congress and legally committed to in contracts. The heart of this tragedy is that universities believe themselves to be devoted to the public good but fall far short of the level of public support they need.
The leading American universities are among the oldest institutions in the country—some of them are older than the country. They couldn't have survived for so long if they hadn't changed many times over the years, in response to internal and external forces. The most significant transformation came in the late nineteenth century, with their embrace of research as a central activity. A generation of American university presidents went to Germany, where the research university originated, to imbibe the new ideal. The primary purpose of the university would henceforth be the pursuit of pure knowledge.
The next transformation came during the Second World War, when the federal government began substantially funding universities. Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who'd spent the war years organizing the government's defense research projects, including the invention of the atomic bomb, wrote a long memo to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 suggesting that the U.S. should launch a major new initiative to fund research at universities. Out of this came the National Science Foundation, in 1950.
Bush's rationale was partly the promise of medical advances and mainly the coming Cold War. American scientists believed that the U.S. would have to enhance its ability to train scientists and sponsor their research in order to compete with the Soviet Union. James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, wrote a series of fervid, utopian essays proposing that universities could conduct government-funded research and liberate the United States from inherited privilege. American universities would draw students from all regions and classes and educate them at minimal cost.
The person who most effectively pulled together the élite and democratic strains was Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California, who built a three-tier system meant to educate the entire youth of the state. But it took hardly any time for the University of California to come under attack—from the left via Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, and then from the right. Ronald Reagan began his political career promising to punish the university for being too tolerant of student radicals.
Knowing what we know now, the postwar years look different, as if a trap was being laid: universities were subject to recurrent animosity from the political right, even as they were becoming ever more dependent on the federal government. In Delmore Schwartz's 1937 short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," the main character imagines shouting at his parents' courtship: "Don't do it. It's not too late to change your minds. Nothing good will come of it."
Today, Princeton has an annual budget of more than three billion dollars and an endowment of more than thirty-five billion dollars. It's at once far more open and far more closed—it accepts less than five per cent of applicants. The student body comes overwhelmingly from the upper middle class or higher. Christopher L. Eisgruber, Princeton's president, acknowledges the tension: "We want to do research of unsurpassed quality, and be open to people from all backgrounds. I don't have a good answer for it."
The over-all picture is of fantastically rich institutions that, while insisting on moral superiority, hand out tickets to futures of private wealth. Michael Young, who popularized the term "meritocracy" in 1958, did so to warn that such a system would become the object of violent populist rage. His novel "The Rise of the Meritocracy" ends with an uprising against the meritocrats in 2033.
Universities' vulnerability is internal as well as external. Holden Thorp, former chancellor of UNC Chapel Hill, gave a cynical version: "If you're a non-Jewish administrator, you've been to so many Shabbat dinners at Hillel that you can say the kiddush. And then you set up a Palestinian-studies center. And when talking to conservative alumni, you say, 'Why don't you get more involved with the business school?' We kept telling people what they wanted to hear."
A dramatic decline of trust in universities among Republicans began during the Obama years. Gallup polls found that between 2015 and 2024, Republicans' trust in universities fell from fifty-six per cent to twenty per cent. Charlie Kirk established Turning Point USA chapters on hundreds of campuses. During the Biden Administration, officials from Trump's first term created think tanks planning a more aggressive approach toward higher education.
The December 5, 2023 hearing was pivotal. Representative Elise Stefanik asked the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T. whether they would tolerate calls for genocide. All three replied that it depends on context. Clips provoked outrage; of seven presidents who testified, only one is still in office.
Josh Gruenbaum from KKR was key to devising the tactic of suspending research grants. Today he's on a team implementing Trump's plan to rebuild Gaza. The White House, under Stephen Miller, has paid attention to dismantling D.E.I. and trans rights. Penn was first to settle, promising to ban trans women from women's athletics. Columbia settled for two hundred million dollars. Harvard sued and won initially, but Trump demanded a billion-dollar penalty.
Christopher Rufo exulted: "We're renegotiating the relationship between the university and the state. The universities violated the fundamental compact." When the attack came, the Association of American Universities made no statement. Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt said, "There's often an inability to get out of the bubble."
Johns Hopkins was a test case. President Ronald Daniels had reached out to conservatives—published "What Universities Owe Democracy," partnered with A.E.I., endorsed hiring conservative faculty. Yet the Administration terminated hundreds of millions in grants. Hopkins's research funding is still down forty-three per cent. Theodore Iwashyna, a researcher, described his life as similar to a small-business owner with a trusted banker—now facing "stochastic dysfunction." Nationally, N.I.H. grants are down more than ninety per cent.
Conservatives cannot compete with major universities. Building new ones is nearly impossible. What's more plausible is that Sun Belt universities will rise, as California universities did after WWII. But they won't be a conservative paradise—just a modified version of the familiar picture.
The government has many weapons. Federal research funding is sixty billion dollars; student-loan debt is over a trillion. What if more conditions were attached? The premise of great American universities is difficult: be fantastically selective yet fair, increase costs relentlessly, assure devotion to public service, and win grateful appreciation. Trump exploited these contradictions. The golden era of autonomy is probably not going to return.